Hacker News Reader

Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

Sigh, we buy their compilers for our clients on a monthly basis because the PPC and ARM support in GCC and Clang is still quite primitive.

The WR compiler generates code that is on average about 50% smaller and 30% faster last time we checked circa 2020, and it is ISO 26262 certified for a safety application.

View on HN

Have you done benchmarks against other competitors? I ask because twenty years ago I used to work for Green Hills' compiler team, and we were very proud of our optimizer at the time (versus both gcc and wind river). That said, I worked on mips and various other chips, not ppc or arm.

Green Hills is a little bit out of our price point. Wind River compiler is very cheap by comparison (ie just a few $k)

The newer versions of the Wind River compiler is based on Clang under the hood. I wonder how the comparisons shake out vs with older versions which were more custom.

I worked on the same floor as the compiler guys and they were probably some of the best programmers in the company, them and the vxworks guys.

It takes a lot to maintain and certify a toolchain. Nevermind that the people working on it are smart people, there's a lot of process that goes into it that can only be implemented with the commercial backing of a big company behind it.

Didn't Intel buy them at some point?

Intel bought them in 2009. Then, in 2018 they were sold to TPG. And in 2020, to Aptiv.

(From the "Our History" section of this page: https://www.windriver.com/company )

Aptiv PLC is the automotive tech company that grew out of the GM spin-off, Delphi Automotive Systems, btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptiv

Delphi owning them makes way more sense than Intel ever did.

Wondered what happened there. I have an old boss who still works for them (managing support I believe). Nice lady.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com